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State Council Publishes Regulations on Preventing and Controlling HIV/AIDS

March 1, 2006

The State Council issued Regulations on AIDS Prevention and Control on January 18. The new regulations, which will take effect on March 1, outline the central government’s most comprehensive policy toward HIV/AIDS since the adoption of the first government guidelines on AIDS in 1987.

The State Council issued Regulations on AIDS Prevention and Control on January 18. The new regulations, which will take effect on March 1, outline the central government’s most comprehensive policy toward HIV/AIDS since the adoption of the first government guidelines on AIDS in 1987.

The regulations address the dominant modes of HIV/AIDS transmission in China, intravenous drug use and sexual contact, as identified in a January 24, 2006, joint Ministry of Health (MOH), World Health Organization (WHO), and UNAIDS report. The regulations call for cooperative measures among health authorities to provide treatment to drug addicts, including the use of methadone, a synthetic narcotic used in drug substitution therapy. The joint MOH, WHO, and UNAIDS report says that about 288,000 drug users in China are living with HIV/AIDS, accounting for 44.3 percent of the total number of estimated HIV cases. The regulations also require local governments to organize AIDS prevention action plans and monitoring systems, encourage local governments to post material about AIDS transmission in public places, and require managers of certain public venues to provide condoms. The new regulations also highlight the responsibility of governments at all levels for treating HIV/AIDS. The regulations require that county-level governments and above provide free anti-HIV/AIDS drugs for rural AIDS patients and poor urban patients, as well as provide free counseling for all HIV/AIDS carriers.

The widespread failure of local governments to implement national policy is one of the greatest challenges in China’s attempts to prevent and control HIV/AIDS. Vice Premier Wu Yi highlighted the implementation problem during a meeting of the State Council Working Committee on AIDS Prevention and Treatment in November 2005.

The regulations also address discrimination against HIV patients, mandating that "no work unit or individual shall discriminate against HIV carriers, AIDS patients, or their families. Legal rights such as those related to marriage, employment, education, and the receipt of medical treatment shall be protected by law." The regulations, however, do not clarify how the law will protect such legal rights. AIDS activist Hu Jia has questioned whether the new laws actually will be enforced, asserting that the "problem in China is not the lack of laws but whether these laws will be implemented by local governments," according to a February 12 Reuters report.

How much support the new regulations may give to the operations of smaller civil society organizations that have been working on AIDS issues remains unclear. The regulations explicitly note that the "government encourages and supports unions, the Chinese Youth League, the All-China Women’s Federation, the Red Cross Society of China, and other organizations to assist each level of government in AIDS prevention work." The listed organizations all represent national mass organizations linked to the Communist Party and government.

The January 24 joint MOH, WHO, and UNAIDS report lowered the estimated number of HIV/AIDS cases in China to 650,000 from the previous official figure of 840,000 that the government released in 2003. The report also estimated that China had 70,000 new HIV infections in 2005, leading international health officials to warn that the situation remains severe, according to January 26 reports by the New York Times and the South China Morning Post (subscription required). The Ministry of Health has also reported that AIDS overtook hepatitis B in 2005 as the third-deadliest infectious disease in China, according to a February 13 Xinhua article. For a further discussion of HIV/AIDS in China, see Section III(h)- Public Health of the Commission’s 2005 Annual Report.